


Home

by Crows_Feet



Series: Home [1]
Category: Archive 81 (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon-typical swearing, Coming Out, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gratuitous use of they/them pronouns, Me? Projecting onto Chris? It's more likely than you think, Nonbinary Chris Anderson, Trans Daniel Powell, Trans Nicholas Waters, but neither of those lads are cis, it's not relevant to the story, remember that time Chris lost six years of character development?, yes I have Feelings about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25463656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crows_Feet/pseuds/Crows_Feet
Summary: Chris’ home has always been something that breathes(Excerpts from Episode 28)
Series: Home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1917883
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	Home

**Author's Note:**

> Only just finished my first listen of Archive 81 but hoo boy I have Feelings about Chris

Chris goes to sleep with short red hair.

She’s not worried about doing magic shrooms, not worried about whatever the fuck a ‘dream journey’ is meant to be. She puts the weird candy in her mouth as instructed, lies down, closes her eyes, and wakes up in the middle of the goddamn ocean.

Okay, so it’s a _literal_ journey. Great. She puts her head down, does what she needs to do in order to get to land, and resolves herself to jump ship at the earliest opportunity.

As it turns out, this world is not much better than her own. Insect fishermen are dicks who steal people’s hair colour, people are creepy assholes even when you’re in a weird alternate dimension, and she _still_ has no way of finding any ambergris. There’s a bar, though, so Chris goes and pulls up a stool and tries to get as fucked up as possible. Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t actually take that long. She’d been a heavy drinker through college (still is, sometimes, when things get bad), so her tolerance _should_ be pretty high, but this alternate dimension booze hits harder than your regular earth stuff, apparently. She hunkers down over the bar, writing off the rest of the afternoon in favour of not being sober, and tries to work out where the hell she’s meant to sleep tonight.

Enter Lou.

He gets points for not being an immediate dick. He gets bonus points for knowing about ambergris - the fucker is even offering her a ride.

So she goes. (What else is she going to do, really?)

She goes, and she joins the crew. She’s their medic, because that’s what they need, and Chris has always been able to mould herself into places where she’ll be needed. (She’s actually pretty good at patching them up, which helps. The sewing lessons her mother forced on her as a kid are finally paying off.)

But she’s restless. There’s a feeling curling in her gut that she’s been pointedly ignoring for the past few years, but here – where nothing makes sense, where insects can be fisherman and alcohol makes your pee blue and there are two goddamn suns in the sky – here, _maybe_ , she can consider the thoughts she’s kept locked away.

It’s a whole year into the voyage before Chris brings it up.

It’s not the first time she’s thought about gender. College was queer as hell and Chris ended up hanging out with a lot of LGBT students. And even aside from that- she’d known about Nick for a couple of years now, so the concept wasn’t something new. But Nicholas had known with steady surety that he was a boy since the age of fourteen, and at college all those nineteen and twenty-somethings had seemed so certain of themselves.

Here’s the thing about Chris: she’s got this front that says _I know what I’m doing_. She comes across as brash and rude and forward and funny, and most of all _confident_.

But if you asked her to quantify her gender she’d freeze.

She’s never told Nick about the way the uncertainty writhes in her stomach. She can’t. Not when he’s been politely saying, “Call me Nicholas, please,” since he was a _kid_. She’s not like him.

She’s not a guy, for one thing.

But it’s been eating away at her, in this alternate dimension, for reasons she can’t even understand, let alone articulate. Because Lou was right, the crew are wonderful, and they’re _weird_ like the college kids who dyed their hair bright colours, but these guys are family in a way those kids never were. The ship breathes underneath her, and it makes her feel like a part of something.

(She’s never been a part of something, not really.)

Lou comes to sit next to her on the prow and they stare out at the ocean for a bit before he says anything.

“You’ve been quiet,” he says, and Chris shrugs. “Homesick?”

“I guess,” says Chris.

“You got someone waiting for you back there?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Nick. My brother.”

Missing Nick and missing home are the same goddamned thing. He’s a dick, and he’s a narc, and a prude, and she _misses_ him. Something inside her has been pulling at her ribs for the longest time, and she’s aching to ask her brother how to quantify yourself in words that make sense.

(He’d probably laugh it off and shrug, the asshole. Probably think she was kidding.)  
(She wouldn’t be.)

“Penny for your thoughts,” says Lou.

Chris opens her mouth. Closes it. And tries again. “When I was in college,” she starts, haltingly. “There were these kids I knew. Y’know- the kids who don’t have parents watching their every move for the first time in their life, and just go batshit crazy. Dyed hair, tattoos, everything, man.” She’s refusing to meet Lou’s eyes, opting instead to stare out at the gently rolling waves, at the reflection of twin suns on the ocean.

“I’d never really met, like, queer people before,” she continues, resolve wavering but forcing herself to keep her voice steady. “And these guys were _kids_. But they already knew so much more shit about, y’know, gender, sexuality, whatever.”

And how the fuck is she meant to explain this? She likes Lou, genuinely likes him. That’s not something that happens all that often - most people are dicks. She’s not sure what she’d do if he weren’t okay with it. With her.

“Sure,” says Lou slowly, when her internal debate drags on a bit longer than she’d intended and the silence begins to stretch. “One of my friends, when I first got here a couple years back, was transgender.”

“No shit?” says Chris, like her heart isn't going a hundred goddamn miles a minute.

“I mean he was also like, 30% tape recorder, but. Cool dude, y’know? Saved my ass a bunch of times out here.”

And what the hell is she supposed to say to that? The thought drags her down a rabbit hole again and she’s only pulled out of it when Lou presses his shoulder against hers.

She’s not usually that keen on physical contact, but this is… nice. The rest of the crew are below deck, so it’s just them, looking out at the horizon.

“I…I just,” she starts. Then stops.

“Christine?”

“Chris,” she says, voice thick and _definitely not starting to shake_.

“Oh,” says Lou. “ _Oh._ Okay.”

And Chris is willing to chicken out at that point and just completely ignore the topic the next time it comes up, and maybe even jump ship at the next port if it comes to it and –

“Chris,” says Lou carefully, “…Would you like to be called something other than ‘she’?”

And Chris just about cries. Throat tight, heat gathering behind eyes that refuse to meet Lou’s, Chris nods, then shrugs in a failed attempt at nonchalance.

“He?” offers Lou gently. When Chris doesn’t react, he tries “They?”

Chris shrugs, feeling like an awkward teenager again, all knobbly knees and uncertainty; anxiety pulling tightly across ribs, heartbeat throbbing beneath skin.

“Maybe ‘they’,” Chris offers quietly, then backtracks, “But, uh. I don’t know. Whatever.”

“That’s okay,” says Lou. “Do you want me to talk to the others about it?”

Chris nods, shakes their head, then nods again. “Maybe, yeah.”

“Okay,” says Lou, and Chris offers an attempt at a shaky smile.

“Okay.”  
  


The crew is, of course, immediately on board with it. Chris isn’t sure why they were so worried about telling them all. After all, it’s not like the normal rules apply here - Teddy is a literal teddy bear. Xkryxx is… well, Chris isn’t exactly sure.

When they’re not patching up members of the crew after a fight, Chris spends most of their time up on the riggings with Sonder, who also uses ‘they’. Spending time with them is…refreshing. Honestly, it’s a relief to be around someone who _gets it_.

It’s nice up there, hanging from the rigging, loose shirts damp with sea spray. The suns don’t burn in quite the same way here. Chris thinks back to middle school lessons on the ozone layer, on greenhouse gases and aerosols, then casts the thought aside. That’s not the way things work here. You can’t science your way out of an alternate dimension if you still want to live in it.

In a port where none of the crew speaks the language, Chris barters for a dark jacket that falls to their knees. They bundle up beneath it at night, the weight of it grounding and familiar despite the gentle rocking of the hammock. It smells of old leather, and of salt. 

It’s easy to forget this is a dream journey. The Irons have lungs – the ship breathes, and the movement can be felt between the rolling of the waves. Chris presses bare feet against the warm deck of their ship and thinks _home_.

Chris’ home has always been something that breathes. Nick will always be their brother, but this, the Irons, pressed up against bare feet; the way they can feel the rigging move with the ship’s lungs on days when the ocean is still; the way Lou meets their eyes across the table at dinner – this is home.

White hair grows long. Chris has never had long hair before, they’ve always hated the weight of it, the way it made their mother look at them - like she finally had a _proper daughter_ (“You just look so nice with your hair like that. You should grow it out a bit more, Christine”).

Chris had buzzed their hair down to the scalp in the bathroom their first week of college and had never felt more alive. Not until now. It’s long and it’s heavy and it tickles Chris’ neck and shoulders, but it’s theirs. It’s white it smells of the ocean and it’s _theirs_.

Sonder shows them how to tie parts of it back so it won’t fall into Chris’ eyes; how to pull strands together into complex braids.

Twin suns warm the deck of the Irons. Lou presses his shoulder against theirs, and they watch the stars together on clear nights.

For the first time, Chris settles in their own bones.

When she wakes up, there’s white hair grown long past her shoulders. In the half second before she opens her eyes, she can almost hear the creak of a ship, but then Nicholas calls her name.

And just like that, the last dregs of the dream are gone.

(She’ll spend the next couple of weeks carding fingers through the ends of long white hair she can’t bring herself to cut. Her fingers twist strands into braids she doesn’t remember learning how to make. It smells like the ocean, like home, but she can’t understand why.)

Chris spends six years growing, settling. They spear a whale to get the ambergris, and the ocean pulls them under.

Christine wakes up.


End file.
